Mydidae, Soho Theatre

Marian and David are a couple who are comfortable in each other’s company. She wonders around their stylish white bathroom in a faded Minnie Mouse T-shirt and a pair of turquoise knickers while flossing her teeth; he takes a long luxuriant piss in her presence. But the bathroom is a place of exposure and vulnerability – a place where people go to cleanse, to purge, to void – and it soon becomes clear that the couple’s seeming ease with one another is only superficial, that something dark and turbulent swims beneath.

Mydidae is a play written to fulfil a particular brief. Jack Thorne was tasked to create a play set entirely in a bathroom by the production company DryWrite, an exercise with shades of Oulipo: liberation through restriction. By narrowing his viewfinder in this way, Thorne has created a two-hander full of unexpected menace that probes and chips at its characters, peeling back layers of skin.

It’s not much of a surprise to discover that these two have lost something precious – Thorne drips that in early – it’s the aftermath of this loss he’s really interested in. Marian and David act out the little routines of domesticity, they fulfil their allotted roles, but there’s a hollow quality to their relationship, an absence. A would-be romantic candle-lit bath – complete with cabernet sauvignon and a shimmering mirage of tea-lights – reeks of cliché; it’s David’s attempt to convince himself that things are still as they were, that they can be again.

Performed on Amy Jane Cook’s fully-plumbed set, complete with working bath, sink and loo, the production has faith in flesh. Its use of nudity is genuinely exposing. Stripped of their clothes and neck-deep in the bathtub, there is nowhere left for Marian and David to hide, from each other’s accusing eyes, from the twisting of their own pain: their hate comes frothing to their surface; love and rage intersect and overspill.

Vicky Jones’ production delivers one brutal, awful jolt; like a shark surfacing, great white teeth bared, it rears up from the deep. Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Keir Charles handle the play’s shifting emotional tone incredibly well, effortlessly moving from the jokey, casual, almost mundane feel of the opening to the much more complex terrain of the play’s mid-section, occasionally pausing in their actions, as if caught off-guard by memory. Their nakedness is beautifully utilised too: the production revelling in the vulnerability of skin, damp and gleaming in the candlelight, the fine line of the spine, the unintentional comedy of the sheepish penis.

Both performances are incredibly measured. Waller-Bridge has a crisp, confident manner that conceals a seam of fragility, but it’s Charles’ unnerving, unblinking stare as he faces her across the bathwater – as he looks at her, into her, through her – that leaves the most lasting impression.

Thorne is adept at creating an undercurrent of unease, an incremental build-up of tension – he’s a master of what John Irving termed the undertoad – and even when Mydidae doesn’t quite ring true psychologically (it’s difficult to believe that this couple’s submarine feelings haven’t surfaced before), it’s still a potent piece of writing. While not quite as devastating as Simon Stephens’ Sea Wall, a play with which it shares some thematic overlap, in its most charged moments it still slices fairly deeply.

Reviewed for Exeunt.

Terror 2011 at Soho Theatre

Terror isn’t quite the word. Disquieting? Yes, perhaps. Creepy? In places. This collection of short plays doesn't really come close to creating genuine terror in its audience, but then nor does it seem to be trying to: it seems to prize the nervous, slightly grossed out chuckle more highly than the scream of real dread and distress.

This peripatetic annual celebration of the macabre and unsettling, last seen at Southwark Playhouse, has been rehomed in Soho Theatre’s basement cabaret space and this relocation seems to have informed the production as a whole because the musical interludes are given almost as much time and room as the plays themselves. The songs, co-written by Desmond O’Connor and Cabaret Whore, Sarah-Louise Young, are spectacularly off-colour: a country and western ditty about abortion, a ballad about anorexics in love. The resulting laughter is often halting and awkward, slow to flow, arriving in guilty little bursts. But by addressing and involving the audience, the songs knit together a production that might otherwise have felt too tonally choppy, too disparate in approach and execution.

Of all the playwrights on the bill, Lucy Kirkwood has taken this merging of music and theatre furthest. Her contribution to the evening is a piece of burlesque, conceived with performer Eleanor Buchan, in which a be-tasselled dancer falls under her own dark spell. It juxtaposes a jokey, nod-wink style with something distinctly icky but doesn’t really leave itself anywhere to go once the premise has been established.

The opening piece, Dave Florez’s The Waiting Mortuary, is similarly stuck. Two nineteenth century doctors debate whether the body laid out on the slab before them has actually expired. The tone of the play – more of a sketch really – is weirdly pitched, a pastiche that seems unsure quite how seriously it wants the audience to take it. Carl Grose’s comic verse monologue, Wormy Close, performed by Amanda Lawrence achieves a far better balance between the horrible and the comic. It’s a silly but endearing piece, a kind of goryJackanory that benefits from Lawrence’s strong sense of timing and delivery. Tom Holloway’s play, If I Stay I Would Only Be in Your Way, is a two-hander that owes a debt to Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters. It’s more genuinely unsettling but it over-plays its hand. There’s something to be said for taking something beyond what appears to be its natural end point and stretching it further than good sense or taste might dictate, but it’s not a gamble that quite pays off, and the resulting laughter is fitful and diminishing.

The most unnerving piece of the night, and also the most successful, is Jack Thorne’s The Gong. Thorne is a writer who knows how to create tension, who understands how to feed information to his audience in the most potent way possible before confirming their worst fears. A torch-lit Ciaran Kellgren stalks around the room, smoking intensely as he recounts his experience of being working class at Cambridge University, and the lengths he will go to fit in, to prove he belongs. It’s a jarring and unpleasant piece, and one that achieves in words what the other plays never quite manage even with all their splatter and seepage and shrieking.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Theatre Uncut

Theatre Uncut is a refusal to lie down and be silent. As the project’s co-ordinator, Hannah Price of Reclaim, has explained, it’s about theatre contributing to the discussion and “joining our voice with the voices that are already out there.” This is not just a response to the cuts in the arts, rather a broader response to the spending cuts in general; an attempt to spark debate and stir feelings.

The project consists of eight short plays by Mark Ravenhill, Lucy Kirkwood, David Grieg, Jack Thorne, Dennis Kelly, Laura Lomas, Anders Lustgarten and Clara Brennan. The plays have been made available rights-free to anyone who wants to stage them. On the 19th March, they will performed by an eclectic array of theatre groups – including am-dram groups and student groups – across the UK (as well as in New York, Chicago and Berlin) with the resulting productions linked together by online networking and video conferencing.

Before that the pieces are being staged in London’s Southwark Playhouse to allow all eight to be seen together. Each writers response has been different; some take a more opaque approach while others aim for the throat – or rather the heart in the case of the first play in the showcase, Laura Lomas’ Open Heart Surgery, a raw allegorical monologue delivered by a woman by a hospital bedside, trying to put a brave face on the fact that something she loves has had its heart ripped out. Dennis Kelly’s Things That Make No Sense is a spikier piece of writing, a Kafka-esque skit in which a man is punished for a crime he didn’t commit, his protests ignored by a pair of smiling police officers.

David Grieg’s piece Fragile is a two-hander in which, in a nod to austerity, the audience is required to play one of the parts, reading their lines en masse from projections on the back of the stage. It takes the form of a conversation between a young man with mental health issues and his case worker; light-hearted at first it becomes increasingly taut as Greig makes the audience think about those at the hard-edge who stand to lose the most as well as the people in between, the people whose jobs are going to become an awful lot harder (that is if they still have jobs)

Both Jack Thorne and Lucy Kirkwood, in Whiff Whaff and Housekeeping, take slightly slanted paths towards the subject at hand. Thorne’s play depicts a cheerful middle class couple who describe how they believe that providing support for the disabled or ailing is somehow defeatist: “The thing is with crutches, they’re crutches.” In Kirkwood’s piece, which has more of a poetic intensity than its premise would suggest, a woman sells off her grandmother to help clear her debts. The grandmother, played by Marlene Sidaway, eyes Zawe Ashton’s brisk, business-like accountant with recognition. She’s marched from Jarrow, debated at Putney; she’s been here before.

Anders Lustgarten’s contribution is not a character piece at all rather a polemic delivered by the playwright himself, in which he neatly explains the economics of the Greek bailout before urging the audience to get angry, to lose their rag, to wake up to the changes they can exert collectively if they try; to, as he puts it, “fuck the fat man” of capitalism.

Mark Ravenhill’s piece, A Bigger Banner, written in response to and in honour of the recent student protests, employs a time-slip set-up in which a student at a university sit-in encounters her 1950s counterpart and ends up reassuring her that the future she’s fighting for so passionately will indeed come to pass. Interestingly it is Ravenhill and Lustgarten’s pieces that have proved most popular with younger groups, perhaps because of their clarity of message, their undiluted call to activism.

The evening concludes with Clara Brennan’s moving monologue Hi Vis, featuring Lisa Palfrey as a mother of a severely disabled daughter, describing her child with love and humour. Each play has its own particularly potency, and though some are blunter instruments than others, together they succeed in their intention to stir, to connect, to create an engagement that spills beyond the theatre walls.

Reviewed for Exeunt I'd also recommend reading Aliki Chapple's account of staging the plays in Lancaster, here.

For further information about the project, visit Theatre Uncut

Greenland at the National Theatre

The polar bear is something of a lumbering paradox; it could kill a man with ease and yet it seems so vulnerable in its whiteness, a vulnerability that has only intensified as its Arctic habitat has come under threat. For this reason the bear, an animal both threatened and threatening, has come to serve as a easy symbol for the damage climate change seems likely to wreak on the planet, for all the things we stand to lose. So the presence of a polar bear in the National Theatre’s attempt to tackle the suject is not exactly surprising, is in fact pretty predictable, and yet this ursine cameo is handled so delightfully that its predictability is eclipsed.

The appearance of the bear, the work of Blind Summit’s puppet-master Mark Down, creates a moment of awe and wonder amid an otherwise noisy and tangled production. Greenland is issue theatre, or perhaps more correctly, Issue Theatre. It takes the subject of climate change and attempts to graft narrative onto it, to inject dramatic life into it. To do this the National has drafted in four writers: Moira Buffini, Matt Charman, Penelope Skinner and Jack Thorne. The production has a jumbled quality, a franticness, though it eventually becomes possible to tease out a number of distinct narrative strands: a young boy with a passion for geography grows up to lead an isolated life studying sea birds in the Arctic Circle; a young girl, much to her parents’ bafflement and dismay, drops out of college to become an activist; the most developed strand, set in the run-up to the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, involves an ambitious political adviser and her burgeoning relationship with a scientist whose projected climate models present a bleak picture for the future of the human race. These stories are interspersed with other characters, other voices, the most interesting being a pair of delegates from Mali. Together they present a less familiar picture, that of a country already feeling the real effects of climate change, encroaching deserts and disrupted rain patterns. But no sooner have they said their piece than they are ushered to one side in a way which could, optimistically, be read as a comment on the general media coverage of the issues at hand. Bijan Sheibani’s production is certainly slick. That’s not intended as a dig; the staging is always visually striking and there are moments of real invention and magic: the polar bear, the silhouettes of swooping circling guillemots. At other times there is a sense of excess and repetition: first plastic bottles fall from the ceiling, then paper, and finally both rain and wind machines get a work-out. Music is used throughout; there’s a brief burst of It’s Raining Men and a rather heavy-handed dance sequence to the strains of Come Fly With Me, presumably intended to illustrate the irony of all the air travel that an event like Copenhagen entails. The obvious parallel is with Rupert Goold’s Enron - and the production’s dramaturg is Goold’s regular collaborator Ben Power. Yet while the markers of the musical, the air of showiness, felt like a bombastic but logical choice for a play about banking and commerce, they feel somewhat shoe-horned in here. There are some strong individual performances, particularly from the ever-watchable Lyndsey Marshal, and there are also a number of moments of genuine humour, yet the overriding tone is didactic and clichéd - the strand with the young activist is particularly limp - and the whole thing has a stitched-together quality This is one of a growing wave of plays about climate change. Richard Bean’s The Heretic (chosen promotional image: the polar bear) at the Royal Court looks set to cover similar ground while Steve Waters’ potent double-bill, The Contingency Plan, has already shown that’s it’s possible to merge gripping and plausible writing with the idea of a threatened world. Here, while it’s possible to glean the thinking behind the exercise, the weight of all the voices serves to sink things. Reviewed for musicOMH